Conceptual Design of a Novel Multi-Wire Feeding System for Metal Wire Additive Manufacturing Processes
摘要
Existing Additive Manufacturing (AM) processes offer great details in small and difficult-to-produce parts, but they are limited in small parts, slow, and expensive. Wire-based Additive Manufacturing (WAM) processes offer more advantages in terms of simplicity, higher deposition rate, and large-scale part production. Apart from several benefits of WAM processes, it is still far behind conventional manufacturing processes in terms of manufacturing time and cost. Furthermore, omnidirectionality is one major bottleneck in most WAM processes, creating inhomogeneity in the material property. This paper presents a novel Multi-Wire Feeding (MWF) system, which can enhance the capabilities of the existing WAM processes by increasing the deposition rate up to four times (up to 50 kg/h) compared to commercially available WAM processes and is capable of producing omnidirectional products with high dimensional accuracy. It consists of a compact four-wire feeding arrangement where four wires of the same/different materials can be used simultaneously, with different feed rates of up to 15 m/min, for manufacturing different heterogeneous materials. To achieve omnidirectionality, the MWF system will oscillate with an oscillation frequency of 10 Hz. A retraction system has also been added for space optimization where the multiwire setup can be retracted, and the allocated space can be used for other purposes. The MWF system is primarily designed for EB/laser-based WAM processes but can also be used for TIG-based WAM processes with minor modifications. The proposed design has been validated for its structural rigidity using Ansys simulation.